Meet the 2024 Food & Wine Best New Chefs

My first assignment as the new restaurant editor at Food & Wine was to figure out the 2024 class of F&W Best New Chefs. Which meant hitting the road — and eating all the time. Over the course of a few months, I must have consumed around 25 pounds of butter and 20 heads of cabbage (the vegetable of the moment). Caviar was everywhere, and onion dip and ranch dressing flowed freely. It’s probably good that I am an active runner.

But putting together this year’s class of Best New Chefs was not a solo affair. Our scouting committee included Food & Wine editorial staffers (like Editor in Chief Hunter Lewis) and BNC alumni (among them 2021 F&W Best New Chef Paola Velez). Collectively, we traveled to dozens of cities, logged tens of thousands of miles, and dined at hundreds of restaurants, searching for the most promising and dynamic chefs cooking today. What we found was 13 remarkable humans who represent the future of cooking in America. 

And that future shines bright. This year’s Best New Chefs are all coming into their own with unique culinary voices that speak loud and clear. That trait has defined every Best New Chef since the first class in 1988 — one that included chefs who went on to shape the direction of cooking in America, like Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud.

Read on to meet the 2024 class of F&W Best New Chefs in this special digital issue. Then keep scrolling to discover the legacies of the 376 Best New Chefs that precede them, through their game-changing recipes (including class of 1989 Nobu Matsuhisa’s miso-glazed cod) and conversations with culinary greats, like Nancy Silverton (class of 1990) and Kwame Onwuachi (class of 2019), who have left their mark on how we cook and dine.

— Raphael Brion, Restaurant Editor